E.M. Prazeman's Blog, page 5
April 1, 2015
News: Conventions
My books will be available at Norwescon in Seatac, WA from April 2-5, 2015. Unfortunately I won't be able to be there, but the books are available at special convention rates. Plus, no shipping charges, you can indulge in instant gratification, and you can fondle them before you buy them. What's not to love?
I'll be attending Worldcon in Spokane, WA, August 19-23, 2015. You can hunt me down like the dog I am and get your books, posters, iPads or whatever autographed, sans happy squee from me unless you specify that you'd like a squee, but I can't guarantee I won't blush. I intend to have physical copies of Oubliette, the first book in The Poisoned Past trilogy, at the convention, along with the original trilogy. As is my tradition at conventions, I'll give away one physical book on the last day, and this year, I'll also hold a raffle for one or more posters. The posters are completely and totally gorgeous, so come to the booth in the dealers room and check it out. You must be present to claim the prizes on Sunday. It's just too awkward to ship them. Read onward for information about reserved and signed copies of my books and posters.
I might attend Rose City Comicon, September 19-20, 2015, in Portland, OR. My books are definitely attending! Again, they'll be offered at special convention rates. If you want a poster of a book cover, they're available at Zazzle, or you can reserve a poster and I'll have it available for you at the convention.
If you contact me (use the form at my website, emprazeman.com) I can have a signed copy of any available book or poster in the series set aside for you for Worldcon or Rose City Comicon. You can have the books or posters personalized, or I can just sign them with my odd swash.
IMPORTANT information regarding reserved and signed copies of books and/or posters:
If you want a reserved book personalized, I ask that you please pay in advance through Paypal. If you just want my autograph, advance payment is not required. I will have a random number of random posters available at Worldcon and Rose City Comicon. They may not be on display, so you'll have to ask if you don't see them. If you want to buy a particular poster at a given convention, you must reserve one. Posters will be the same price as you can get them on Zazzle ($11.95) but that's quite a bargain because you won't pay shipping.
The deadline for a reserved copies of books and posters for Worldcon is July 15, 2015, and for Rose City Comicon the deadline is August 15, 2015 so they can arrive on time for the convention.
SUPER IMPORTANT information regarding which books can be reserved: As the year rushes onward the books in The Poisoned Past will go on presale and be placed on a solid release schedule. You may not reserve a copy of any book that hasn't been released in physical form yet. Books that are being presold have not been published as a physical book yet and therefore I can't order them for you and sign them. I'll try to be clear when I respond to your requests through the contact form so that no one is upset or disappointed. Trust me, I'm writing the books as fast as I can! They'll be released as soon as my cover artist returns the art, my book designer formats them for print, and all that good stuff.
March 30, 2015
New Website + story
I've put up the skeleton of a new website at emprazeman.com. Let me know what you think! I don't have much time to work on it, but whenever I come up with content, my webmaster is very quick to put it up. Also, you can read this blog over there if you prefer.
I'm working on a short story set in the jester's universe, back about 500 years when knights earned pieces of soul from their regents and jesters wore bells. I'll let you know if the story makes it into the anthology!
I'm working on a short story set in the jester's universe, back about 500 years when knights earned pieces of soul from their regents and jesters wore bells. I'll let you know if the story makes it into the anthology!
February 22, 2015
The Deep Roots of Love and F**king, Part III
These get harder to write as I go along. Not because I'm shy, but because the more recent the history, the higher the chances are that someone will feel exposed by what I write, So, I have to be careful.
When I met the man of my dreams, a lot was going on. For the first time I'd gotten to a place in my life where people were actually pursuing me. And I wasn't sure how to deal with that. I was clumsy, I missed signals, I didn't respect people's feelings like I would now because part of me couldn't believe that anyone could feel strongly about me. Could see me as anything other than a piece in a game, a game that I didn't understand the rules because I didn't date in high school. I still didn't date. I'd go out with mobs of friends and buy the cheapest thing on the menu because we couldn't afford much of anything. The first time I danced at a dance, two guys were posturing and I didn't know if they were trying to use me as way to determine who was the better man or not. It seemed like they were more into arguing with each other than having anything to do with me. I liked them, but ... I faded into the crowd. I don't even know if they noticed I'd left them. And I began to dance. Bili Idol's "Dancing With Myself," one of my favorite songs at the time. It called to me, told me, this is better. You want to dance, then dance. Stop looking for someone to dance with and just let go.
And it was amazing.
I've had a love affair with dancing ever since.
Anyway, I'd gotten my first taste of what it felt like to be desireable, but something major was missing. I didn't think it was all that great. In fact, it kind of sucked. It didn't seem to have anything to do with love or being with someone I care about who cares about me. It seemed to be about who wins.
To add to my doubts about my prospects for finding happiness, one of my friends was crazy in love with a serious nut case. One of the things he did to fuck with her head was come into my dorm room, and without warning he got on top of me and was all over me. I'm stronger than I look, which is one of the reasons I wasn't raped back in high school. I launched him into the air and he hit the ground so hard he couldn't breathe. I banished him from my dorm room. I called it Hell, btw. I had a poster on the door with flames and everything. Banished from Hell. My friend didn't know what to do, of course. I told her, he's an asshole, he's not into you, he's not into me either he just did that to hurt you ... don't give him your heart. He's not worthy.
Hearts, sadly, don't work that way. She hurt for a long time. He hurt her for a long time.
One day I arrived at home with no memory of driving there. I don't remember saying it, but my mother told me I told her that I thought I'd been drugged. Then I collapsed on the couch and slept for hours. I hadn't been hurt. I think I got out of whatever I'd gotten into unscathed. Still. Scary. I learned, I can't trust people anymore. I have to be careful. They're not just playing to win. They don't care about rules. This isn't a game. It's cutthroat, nasty shit. Not long after, my roommate got drunk and passed out, and someone, maybe more than one person, raped her.
When I met the love of my life, it was that kind of stuff that was going on. Predators. Head game bullshit. Posturing. Conversations that didn't seem to be interactive so much as testing me, looking for a weakness they could exploit.
And then my friends showed me a picture of this really hot guy in a bowtie. For the first time, I experienced lust. Amazing thing, lust. Heat. Pressure. Need. Longing. Not just in the places an innocent might expect. All over, a delicious ache. They asked me what I thought. I said, he looks arrogant. And he did. Very full of himself, head cocked, shirtless with an amazing, amazing ripped body. Someone who would never have anything to do with someone like me.
It was a setup, though I didn't realize it. Clueless me, remember? Turned out he was coming back to my very college. I helped him move in. And as I carried in the last box, my sneaky, wonderful friends all magically vanished, leaving us alone.
Those assholes. I love them. They knew what I'd been through. They were going through the same shit. But they knew this guy. They knew he was different. They knew he wouldn't hurt me.
Finally I met someone who was so interested in me, that he interrogated me about every detail of my life. He wanted to know how I felt about everything. If he'd been a predator, I would have been caught so easily. I found myself trusting him despite all the other crap I'd seen. I have no idea if I interrogated him back. I have very little memory of what we talked about except flies being extra protein in food and maybe something about sailing. In my hormonal haze, I was probably a jerk. But he more than put up with me. We courted for days at most. Those days seemed to last a long time, spending all day with him, skipping classes though he admonished me about that when he caught me doing it. We had our first kiss. We had our first night together. Then many nights.
I told him that I didn't want him to feel like he had to be exclusive to me, even though I desperately wanted him to be. I didn't want to force him to be monogamous if he wasn't naturally inclined to be that. I wanted him to be with me because he wanted to be with me, not because it would break a promise or I'd freak out if he found someone better or just someone he wanted to date at the same time. I was so sure he would find someone better. His response was that I could see other people if I wanted to too. He just asked me to let him know.
I discovered I was monogamous. Actually, I was Monogamous, more than I could have ever thought I could be. I'd always thought that it made more sense, intellectually, that people would be together and move apart as they grew, matured, changed tastes, had changes of heart, learned more about themselves and each other, and so on. I thought I would be that way. I thought he was that way, that most people were that way and that marriage screwed things up by forcing people to stay together beyond the point where they were good for each other. He'd already been in other relationships. It made intellectual sense he would have relationships after me, and I would have other relationships after we'd separated too.
Except we kept staying together, being faithful to each other, even when we drove each other to the brink of leaving each other forever, we were faithful.
It seemed crazy, how into and all over each other we were, even long after we'd learned about as much as two people can learn about each other, flaws and all. My relatives thought I was crazy. I was young, I hadn't seen much of the world, and here I'd fallen hard for this one guy.
This amazing guy I could never be good enough to be worthy of him.
It proved to me that what we intellectualize, what we believe is right and wrong with love and sex and relationships may not hold up to what our hearts demand. What we think we know about ourselves might not be true. What we think other people do and believe when it comes to sex and love might not mesh with the reality of who they are inside, as opposed to who they think they are or think they want to be or what they do to please someone else or to keep someone else because they're afraid to be alone or they don't want to lose the aspects of the relationship they have that are good, no matter how bad the rest might be.
In that one big, long sentence are many of the pieces that hold a couple together, for better or worse. There's lots more I've seen as I've gotten older. I've watched friends marry and divorce, stay together, have kids, date, swing, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Queer couples and trios, families of three plus kids, marriages where a spouse is more like a child than an adult, marriages with large age differences, emotionally abusive relationships, silly supportive relationships, no close sexual relationships--just fuck buddies with whatever gender because it's the friendship not hormones that matter, control freak vs. passive aggressive, on and on. So many ways to love. So many ways to hurt and manipulate each other into maintaining a sexual relationship for the orgasms, or for the feeling of dominance, or to keep up appearances or for the kids or whatever.
Watching these human expressions of coupling and polyamory fascinates us because human beings are endlessly interesting to watch. We want to fix lovers who are having problems and make them be good to each other. Where does that impulse come from? Why do we wish so much for the love story to turn out okay in the end, even if the problems in the relationship go on and on with no hope in sight? Why do we demand that an unworthy be cast out of someone's life so that they can be with someone better in the future? Is it because at its core, love and good are the same? Good guys should win, and love should prevail. I like that. Let's go with that. Real love. Real, good and true love, partners in life who take care of each other, trust each other, and respect each other, however many partners there might be, for as long as they are good and true to each other. Good people who do good things together and make the world a better place just by caring about and for each other.
I like that a lot.
When I met the man of my dreams, a lot was going on. For the first time I'd gotten to a place in my life where people were actually pursuing me. And I wasn't sure how to deal with that. I was clumsy, I missed signals, I didn't respect people's feelings like I would now because part of me couldn't believe that anyone could feel strongly about me. Could see me as anything other than a piece in a game, a game that I didn't understand the rules because I didn't date in high school. I still didn't date. I'd go out with mobs of friends and buy the cheapest thing on the menu because we couldn't afford much of anything. The first time I danced at a dance, two guys were posturing and I didn't know if they were trying to use me as way to determine who was the better man or not. It seemed like they were more into arguing with each other than having anything to do with me. I liked them, but ... I faded into the crowd. I don't even know if they noticed I'd left them. And I began to dance. Bili Idol's "Dancing With Myself," one of my favorite songs at the time. It called to me, told me, this is better. You want to dance, then dance. Stop looking for someone to dance with and just let go.
And it was amazing.
I've had a love affair with dancing ever since.
Anyway, I'd gotten my first taste of what it felt like to be desireable, but something major was missing. I didn't think it was all that great. In fact, it kind of sucked. It didn't seem to have anything to do with love or being with someone I care about who cares about me. It seemed to be about who wins.
To add to my doubts about my prospects for finding happiness, one of my friends was crazy in love with a serious nut case. One of the things he did to fuck with her head was come into my dorm room, and without warning he got on top of me and was all over me. I'm stronger than I look, which is one of the reasons I wasn't raped back in high school. I launched him into the air and he hit the ground so hard he couldn't breathe. I banished him from my dorm room. I called it Hell, btw. I had a poster on the door with flames and everything. Banished from Hell. My friend didn't know what to do, of course. I told her, he's an asshole, he's not into you, he's not into me either he just did that to hurt you ... don't give him your heart. He's not worthy.
Hearts, sadly, don't work that way. She hurt for a long time. He hurt her for a long time.
One day I arrived at home with no memory of driving there. I don't remember saying it, but my mother told me I told her that I thought I'd been drugged. Then I collapsed on the couch and slept for hours. I hadn't been hurt. I think I got out of whatever I'd gotten into unscathed. Still. Scary. I learned, I can't trust people anymore. I have to be careful. They're not just playing to win. They don't care about rules. This isn't a game. It's cutthroat, nasty shit. Not long after, my roommate got drunk and passed out, and someone, maybe more than one person, raped her.
When I met the love of my life, it was that kind of stuff that was going on. Predators. Head game bullshit. Posturing. Conversations that didn't seem to be interactive so much as testing me, looking for a weakness they could exploit.
And then my friends showed me a picture of this really hot guy in a bowtie. For the first time, I experienced lust. Amazing thing, lust. Heat. Pressure. Need. Longing. Not just in the places an innocent might expect. All over, a delicious ache. They asked me what I thought. I said, he looks arrogant. And he did. Very full of himself, head cocked, shirtless with an amazing, amazing ripped body. Someone who would never have anything to do with someone like me.
It was a setup, though I didn't realize it. Clueless me, remember? Turned out he was coming back to my very college. I helped him move in. And as I carried in the last box, my sneaky, wonderful friends all magically vanished, leaving us alone.
Those assholes. I love them. They knew what I'd been through. They were going through the same shit. But they knew this guy. They knew he was different. They knew he wouldn't hurt me.
Finally I met someone who was so interested in me, that he interrogated me about every detail of my life. He wanted to know how I felt about everything. If he'd been a predator, I would have been caught so easily. I found myself trusting him despite all the other crap I'd seen. I have no idea if I interrogated him back. I have very little memory of what we talked about except flies being extra protein in food and maybe something about sailing. In my hormonal haze, I was probably a jerk. But he more than put up with me. We courted for days at most. Those days seemed to last a long time, spending all day with him, skipping classes though he admonished me about that when he caught me doing it. We had our first kiss. We had our first night together. Then many nights.
I told him that I didn't want him to feel like he had to be exclusive to me, even though I desperately wanted him to be. I didn't want to force him to be monogamous if he wasn't naturally inclined to be that. I wanted him to be with me because he wanted to be with me, not because it would break a promise or I'd freak out if he found someone better or just someone he wanted to date at the same time. I was so sure he would find someone better. His response was that I could see other people if I wanted to too. He just asked me to let him know.
I discovered I was monogamous. Actually, I was Monogamous, more than I could have ever thought I could be. I'd always thought that it made more sense, intellectually, that people would be together and move apart as they grew, matured, changed tastes, had changes of heart, learned more about themselves and each other, and so on. I thought I would be that way. I thought he was that way, that most people were that way and that marriage screwed things up by forcing people to stay together beyond the point where they were good for each other. He'd already been in other relationships. It made intellectual sense he would have relationships after me, and I would have other relationships after we'd separated too.
Except we kept staying together, being faithful to each other, even when we drove each other to the brink of leaving each other forever, we were faithful.
It seemed crazy, how into and all over each other we were, even long after we'd learned about as much as two people can learn about each other, flaws and all. My relatives thought I was crazy. I was young, I hadn't seen much of the world, and here I'd fallen hard for this one guy.
This amazing guy I could never be good enough to be worthy of him.
It proved to me that what we intellectualize, what we believe is right and wrong with love and sex and relationships may not hold up to what our hearts demand. What we think we know about ourselves might not be true. What we think other people do and believe when it comes to sex and love might not mesh with the reality of who they are inside, as opposed to who they think they are or think they want to be or what they do to please someone else or to keep someone else because they're afraid to be alone or they don't want to lose the aspects of the relationship they have that are good, no matter how bad the rest might be.
In that one big, long sentence are many of the pieces that hold a couple together, for better or worse. There's lots more I've seen as I've gotten older. I've watched friends marry and divorce, stay together, have kids, date, swing, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Queer couples and trios, families of three plus kids, marriages where a spouse is more like a child than an adult, marriages with large age differences, emotionally abusive relationships, silly supportive relationships, no close sexual relationships--just fuck buddies with whatever gender because it's the friendship not hormones that matter, control freak vs. passive aggressive, on and on. So many ways to love. So many ways to hurt and manipulate each other into maintaining a sexual relationship for the orgasms, or for the feeling of dominance, or to keep up appearances or for the kids or whatever.
Watching these human expressions of coupling and polyamory fascinates us because human beings are endlessly interesting to watch. We want to fix lovers who are having problems and make them be good to each other. Where does that impulse come from? Why do we wish so much for the love story to turn out okay in the end, even if the problems in the relationship go on and on with no hope in sight? Why do we demand that an unworthy be cast out of someone's life so that they can be with someone better in the future? Is it because at its core, love and good are the same? Good guys should win, and love should prevail. I like that. Let's go with that. Real love. Real, good and true love, partners in life who take care of each other, trust each other, and respect each other, however many partners there might be, for as long as they are good and true to each other. Good people who do good things together and make the world a better place just by caring about and for each other.
I like that a lot.
February 19, 2015
THE DEEP ROOTS OF LOVE & F**KING, PART TWO
In the last post I talked a bit about Jeffrey, and how his world view came from my darker experiences in Jr. High. Now I'd like to talk about Mark, and sex, and love, and high school. It's fitting that Jeffrey, a supporting character at best, emerged from a younger time in my life than Mark, the main and point of view character in The Lord Jester's Legacy trilogy.
So there I was, unwanted, unloved, and in a brand new school that seemed ten times bigger than all my other schools that I'd been to. That's how I felt, but that wasn't how it was. My neighbor and best friend, H., came along with me. So did the local bully and my crush. The bully picked on my crush, btw. Called him Kwai Chang Caine. Who, not surprisingly, I had a celebrity crush on. Neither David Carradine, the star who died so tragically (and amid scandal and, by the coarser elements in our society, public ridicule) nor my crush were of Asian descent. This seems fitting.
Anyway, I slowly began to collect friends from among my theater, choir, and orchestra classmates. Looking back with my adult eyes, I should have known that yes, the guys I hung out with, every last one of them, were gay. They were in choir and theater. Hello! It's a cliche' for a reason! But I didn't even know about the cliche'. I just knew that I loved them all to pieces. They were my new best friends. With my neighbor friend H and one other girl, I came to know a bunch of guys. And one of them was openly gay.
R. got beat up almost every single day. Try to comprehend that. Every day. Not once in a while, not when he got caught alone in the hall. Publicly. Frequently. Sometimes more than once a day, right there between classes among crowds of other kids who did nothing to help because they were afraid of the people hurting him, or silently agreed that he deserved it. He basically invented from scratch a form of aikido to keep from getting killed. Guys used to take off his hat, spit in it and force it back on his head, and certain ones would never let him pass the hall without hassling him in some way. That's what it mean to be out back then. In some places, that's still what it's like to be out. In some other places, you can't be out at all or you'll be killed. I saw the potential for that every day he showed up for class. It amazed me that he came to school at all. I couldn't have done it. He and I would sigh over the Soloflex Man (woo hoo, I married someone built like that!!) in the back of English class, and then after class, over six feet of young man would steel himself for another round of suffering. The only thing I could think of to do was to be his friend, because most people were afraid to be his friend or didn't want to be. It didn't seem like enough. Sometimes I wish I'd done more, but then again, how much worse would it be if he was rescued by a little theater/orchestra nerd even once? To add another truly awful thing to the already horrific awfulness of it all, I think some instinct warned him, or maybe he consciously knew, that if he fought back (he was tall and strong) then they really would kill him. Dead forever. So he only defended himself. He never, ever fought back.
Sometimes I hate people.
In the last post I mentioned that someone considered me a scary tough in Jr. High. That would be S. Polar opposite of R. He confessed that to me after we got to know each other a bit in choir. It shocked me, but he seemed to enjoy the fact that he used to be afraid of me, and then we became friends. He dated a preppy girl exactly of the sort that preppy boys should date, and he held hands with her in the hallway. He was always neat and tidy and perfectly normal (too perfect, actually--that should have clued me in but I didn't know the cliche's yet,) while R. was into edgy fashion that drew even more attention to the center of (very negative) attention. S. was smart, funny, but in a way he seemed very serious and concerned about his reputation. Not in the way you'd think. He hung out with us outcasts, after all. But he wanted to be proper. I could tell. And I thought that was really wonderful. A proper, perfect, very handsome young man. I adored him. Not sexually, though, as if my body knew we wouldn't fit together.
I found out S. was gay, my last hold-out straight guy friend, after he went off to college. He wrote back to the group in a letter addressed to my best friend/neighbor. He'd found love, and he was so happy with his boyfriend. And I was surprised, but so happy for him. I didn't care who S. was with, as long as he was happy. I wanted that for R. I wanted all of my friends to find happiness and love.
Combine that with my best girlfriend trying to kiss me one night and a Cyrano-style relationship I had that I still wasn't sure was her, never could be sure it was her, and that her across the street neighbor tried to rape me (he took me to a remote location and even brought along handcuffs), and that one of the most passionate kisses I received when I was young was from a beautiful person who happened to share my gender, you can imagine my ideas about sex and love and loving sex and fucking and rape have deep, deep roots.
Part of me believes this is normal. Everyone grows up like this, knowing people with all kinds of preferences, right? I don't know.
One of my beloved high school friends got into the leather community. I adored him too. He died very, very young. I hope he found happiness before he became ill. I miss him very much. I never blamed his preferences for his death. No one knew, in the 80's, that sex could be deadly. It wasn't his fault. He would have been careful if he'd known he needed to be.
Considering how much I cared about my friends and the fact that I knew them to be good, wonderful people, why wouldn't I think that leather, bondage, rough play, transvestites, anal sex, oral sex, sex upside down hanging from bungee cords, blade play, bookends, orgies, food, fur, latex, toys, little people, masturbation, adult films ... why wouldn't I find that normal? Not all or even any great number of those are my thing, but they're normal. Oh, and about that little people thing, since I knew a girl with pretty severe dwarfism in high school (as in just over 3' tall) -- news flash! People born with dwarfism get to have sex too, and get to fall in love, and have kids if they want and are physically able, and whatever else they may dream of in their hearts. Where is it written that people who find them hot are sick, or that they have to stick to 'their own kind.' What an offensive concept.
Where sexual preferences start to bother me is when there's a lack of consent, a massive difference in power or age, emotional and/or physical abuse (including killing or harming animals--sorry hamster fetishists), and child abuse which falls under both the categories of massive difference in age and power, but in my mind requires special mention. The rule is in any realm of life, don't harm people. Be good to people. Consider their needs before your own. It's not string theory (hard and impractical). But, just like common sense seems to be uncommon, sometimes it feels like common decency is also uncommon. There are too many people who haven't been taught that treating each other well uplifts the entire community, while beating each other down makes everyone but a very few on top miserable. But I think that may be my cynicism showing. If I look at it honestly, at least where I live, most people are awesome.
Love, friendship, sexuality. They're linked in my mind. We were girls and boys in love, though most people wouldn't call it that. We shared our feelings. We cried together, laughed together. We created wonderful works of art and music, you can't even imagine. Every day, playing music, singing, drawing, sculpting with clay, writing stories, poetry, books, playing role-playing games, acting, setting up stages. Every single fucking day we created something gorgeous, and we admired each other's work. We encouraged each other, kept striving to do better. Some days, I was barely home. I was with them.
Amazingly, during this time when I was surrounded by love and friends, I felt incredibly unloved. That is Mark in The Lord Jester's Legacy, at his core. I had to bully someone into taking me to the prom, and I made him take me to another school's prom, because I was so sure I would be humiliated and laughed at at my own if I tried to make myself attractive. I wore all black with a hot pink ribbon. A funeral with a kiss. Goodbye to my dreams of being desirable, but I was going to have fun anyway. No one asked me out on a date. I decided I had a big nose, a blah figure and I could be a great friend but no one's lover. Mark believes tht though he has friends and lovers, no one LOVES him. They use him. He's a convenience, a tool, something to manipulate, a means to an end. My high school blindness is his blindness. I couldn't see the love all around me, because it didn't fit my narrow view of what love is, what it feels like, what it does. We loved each other, meaning, we trusted each other, took care of each other, wanted the world for each other, and gave everything we had for each other. No sex back then. Just love. I didn't know what I had. I didn't appreciate it.
Back then I wasn't ready for sex anyway. I didn't know it. I was afraid of it, yet I thought I wanted it, to have it proved that I was desirable. I didn't realize that I hadn't met someone who would light my fire and make me ache, because I hadn't ached for someone yet. I didn't know the difference between a crush and lust. Wow. What a revelation that would be.
Anyway. When I write, I write about everyone because of high school. Everyone gets a fair chance to do and be whatever they want on the page, and to be different from each other even when you do the math, they seem the same. Also, because that's life, everyone gets screwed by their desires, because love, no matter the form, isn't a diamond with perfect interlocking structure that makes it hard (a lot of us like hard) and immovable (that, not so much.) Whether it's personality conflicts, physical conflicts, emotional issues or the fact that she's really hot but she doesn't smell right and everything fizzles right there ... that's human. That's humanity. It's a very good thing. Our diversity saves us. If one sort of person doesn't work out as a long term relationship, assuming you want such a thing, there's another, different person, not just another cardboard cutout of the same thing. For that reason, for me, I could never write the token woman, the token gay, the token black guy (who's magical! Ugh) and the stereotypical love interest because during high school I became well acquainted with the concept that the 'same type' of people were all different from each other, but all human and loveable. To find love and keep it, maybe people can try to accept that love isn't perfect, but is beautiful anyway, as it is, imperfections and all. It's worth the work to keep it going even when it's not quite exactly what you think you want, as long as no one is being harmed in the process.
Verai and Mark in the series aren't perfect for each other. But they're great together, like my friends and I were all different and all great together. Many of us shared sexual preferences if you go by the numbers, on the surface, by our gender and which gender we'd be willing to sleep with. Birds of a feather? Maybe just birds of different feathers that flocked together.
That individuality with enough commonality to give us a shared language kept us together back then. Humans form imperfect pairings that love in imperfect but very beautiful ways. That's love. That's life.
And life is imperfectly but undeniably beautiful.
So there I was, unwanted, unloved, and in a brand new school that seemed ten times bigger than all my other schools that I'd been to. That's how I felt, but that wasn't how it was. My neighbor and best friend, H., came along with me. So did the local bully and my crush. The bully picked on my crush, btw. Called him Kwai Chang Caine. Who, not surprisingly, I had a celebrity crush on. Neither David Carradine, the star who died so tragically (and amid scandal and, by the coarser elements in our society, public ridicule) nor my crush were of Asian descent. This seems fitting.
Anyway, I slowly began to collect friends from among my theater, choir, and orchestra classmates. Looking back with my adult eyes, I should have known that yes, the guys I hung out with, every last one of them, were gay. They were in choir and theater. Hello! It's a cliche' for a reason! But I didn't even know about the cliche'. I just knew that I loved them all to pieces. They were my new best friends. With my neighbor friend H and one other girl, I came to know a bunch of guys. And one of them was openly gay.
R. got beat up almost every single day. Try to comprehend that. Every day. Not once in a while, not when he got caught alone in the hall. Publicly. Frequently. Sometimes more than once a day, right there between classes among crowds of other kids who did nothing to help because they were afraid of the people hurting him, or silently agreed that he deserved it. He basically invented from scratch a form of aikido to keep from getting killed. Guys used to take off his hat, spit in it and force it back on his head, and certain ones would never let him pass the hall without hassling him in some way. That's what it mean to be out back then. In some places, that's still what it's like to be out. In some other places, you can't be out at all or you'll be killed. I saw the potential for that every day he showed up for class. It amazed me that he came to school at all. I couldn't have done it. He and I would sigh over the Soloflex Man (woo hoo, I married someone built like that!!) in the back of English class, and then after class, over six feet of young man would steel himself for another round of suffering. The only thing I could think of to do was to be his friend, because most people were afraid to be his friend or didn't want to be. It didn't seem like enough. Sometimes I wish I'd done more, but then again, how much worse would it be if he was rescued by a little theater/orchestra nerd even once? To add another truly awful thing to the already horrific awfulness of it all, I think some instinct warned him, or maybe he consciously knew, that if he fought back (he was tall and strong) then they really would kill him. Dead forever. So he only defended himself. He never, ever fought back.
Sometimes I hate people.
In the last post I mentioned that someone considered me a scary tough in Jr. High. That would be S. Polar opposite of R. He confessed that to me after we got to know each other a bit in choir. It shocked me, but he seemed to enjoy the fact that he used to be afraid of me, and then we became friends. He dated a preppy girl exactly of the sort that preppy boys should date, and he held hands with her in the hallway. He was always neat and tidy and perfectly normal (too perfect, actually--that should have clued me in but I didn't know the cliche's yet,) while R. was into edgy fashion that drew even more attention to the center of (very negative) attention. S. was smart, funny, but in a way he seemed very serious and concerned about his reputation. Not in the way you'd think. He hung out with us outcasts, after all. But he wanted to be proper. I could tell. And I thought that was really wonderful. A proper, perfect, very handsome young man. I adored him. Not sexually, though, as if my body knew we wouldn't fit together.
I found out S. was gay, my last hold-out straight guy friend, after he went off to college. He wrote back to the group in a letter addressed to my best friend/neighbor. He'd found love, and he was so happy with his boyfriend. And I was surprised, but so happy for him. I didn't care who S. was with, as long as he was happy. I wanted that for R. I wanted all of my friends to find happiness and love.
Combine that with my best girlfriend trying to kiss me one night and a Cyrano-style relationship I had that I still wasn't sure was her, never could be sure it was her, and that her across the street neighbor tried to rape me (he took me to a remote location and even brought along handcuffs), and that one of the most passionate kisses I received when I was young was from a beautiful person who happened to share my gender, you can imagine my ideas about sex and love and loving sex and fucking and rape have deep, deep roots.
Part of me believes this is normal. Everyone grows up like this, knowing people with all kinds of preferences, right? I don't know.
One of my beloved high school friends got into the leather community. I adored him too. He died very, very young. I hope he found happiness before he became ill. I miss him very much. I never blamed his preferences for his death. No one knew, in the 80's, that sex could be deadly. It wasn't his fault. He would have been careful if he'd known he needed to be.
Considering how much I cared about my friends and the fact that I knew them to be good, wonderful people, why wouldn't I think that leather, bondage, rough play, transvestites, anal sex, oral sex, sex upside down hanging from bungee cords, blade play, bookends, orgies, food, fur, latex, toys, little people, masturbation, adult films ... why wouldn't I find that normal? Not all or even any great number of those are my thing, but they're normal. Oh, and about that little people thing, since I knew a girl with pretty severe dwarfism in high school (as in just over 3' tall) -- news flash! People born with dwarfism get to have sex too, and get to fall in love, and have kids if they want and are physically able, and whatever else they may dream of in their hearts. Where is it written that people who find them hot are sick, or that they have to stick to 'their own kind.' What an offensive concept.
Where sexual preferences start to bother me is when there's a lack of consent, a massive difference in power or age, emotional and/or physical abuse (including killing or harming animals--sorry hamster fetishists), and child abuse which falls under both the categories of massive difference in age and power, but in my mind requires special mention. The rule is in any realm of life, don't harm people. Be good to people. Consider their needs before your own. It's not string theory (hard and impractical). But, just like common sense seems to be uncommon, sometimes it feels like common decency is also uncommon. There are too many people who haven't been taught that treating each other well uplifts the entire community, while beating each other down makes everyone but a very few on top miserable. But I think that may be my cynicism showing. If I look at it honestly, at least where I live, most people are awesome.
Love, friendship, sexuality. They're linked in my mind. We were girls and boys in love, though most people wouldn't call it that. We shared our feelings. We cried together, laughed together. We created wonderful works of art and music, you can't even imagine. Every day, playing music, singing, drawing, sculpting with clay, writing stories, poetry, books, playing role-playing games, acting, setting up stages. Every single fucking day we created something gorgeous, and we admired each other's work. We encouraged each other, kept striving to do better. Some days, I was barely home. I was with them.
Amazingly, during this time when I was surrounded by love and friends, I felt incredibly unloved. That is Mark in The Lord Jester's Legacy, at his core. I had to bully someone into taking me to the prom, and I made him take me to another school's prom, because I was so sure I would be humiliated and laughed at at my own if I tried to make myself attractive. I wore all black with a hot pink ribbon. A funeral with a kiss. Goodbye to my dreams of being desirable, but I was going to have fun anyway. No one asked me out on a date. I decided I had a big nose, a blah figure and I could be a great friend but no one's lover. Mark believes tht though he has friends and lovers, no one LOVES him. They use him. He's a convenience, a tool, something to manipulate, a means to an end. My high school blindness is his blindness. I couldn't see the love all around me, because it didn't fit my narrow view of what love is, what it feels like, what it does. We loved each other, meaning, we trusted each other, took care of each other, wanted the world for each other, and gave everything we had for each other. No sex back then. Just love. I didn't know what I had. I didn't appreciate it.
Back then I wasn't ready for sex anyway. I didn't know it. I was afraid of it, yet I thought I wanted it, to have it proved that I was desirable. I didn't realize that I hadn't met someone who would light my fire and make me ache, because I hadn't ached for someone yet. I didn't know the difference between a crush and lust. Wow. What a revelation that would be.
Anyway. When I write, I write about everyone because of high school. Everyone gets a fair chance to do and be whatever they want on the page, and to be different from each other even when you do the math, they seem the same. Also, because that's life, everyone gets screwed by their desires, because love, no matter the form, isn't a diamond with perfect interlocking structure that makes it hard (a lot of us like hard) and immovable (that, not so much.) Whether it's personality conflicts, physical conflicts, emotional issues or the fact that she's really hot but she doesn't smell right and everything fizzles right there ... that's human. That's humanity. It's a very good thing. Our diversity saves us. If one sort of person doesn't work out as a long term relationship, assuming you want such a thing, there's another, different person, not just another cardboard cutout of the same thing. For that reason, for me, I could never write the token woman, the token gay, the token black guy (who's magical! Ugh) and the stereotypical love interest because during high school I became well acquainted with the concept that the 'same type' of people were all different from each other, but all human and loveable. To find love and keep it, maybe people can try to accept that love isn't perfect, but is beautiful anyway, as it is, imperfections and all. It's worth the work to keep it going even when it's not quite exactly what you think you want, as long as no one is being harmed in the process.
Verai and Mark in the series aren't perfect for each other. But they're great together, like my friends and I were all different and all great together. Many of us shared sexual preferences if you go by the numbers, on the surface, by our gender and which gender we'd be willing to sleep with. Birds of a feather? Maybe just birds of different feathers that flocked together.
That individuality with enough commonality to give us a shared language kept us together back then. Humans form imperfect pairings that love in imperfect but very beautiful ways. That's love. That's life.
And life is imperfectly but undeniably beautiful.
February 18, 2015
The Deep Roots of Love & F**king, Part One
Many of the reasons I write sex into my books and the kind of sex my characters experience has to do with, well, everything.
The first time I was propositioned, a proxy for the young man approached me, insulted me, then complemented my legs and offered money on behalf of his friend. To this day I wonder if his friend, who I knew, was being set up for a joke, if they were mocking me, setting me up, or what. I was thirteen years old, not well-liked, and feared, unbeknownst to me, by someone even more miserable at that fucking school than I was. I didn't know I had a reputation for being a tough kid until a few years later. Some of that reputation came from another friend, whose house I slept over at one night that same year. She had tons of locks on her door on the inside that she'd stolen and installed herself. When her father came home that night, drunk, she pulled me into her room, shut the door, locked all the locks and told me that we were safe, he couldn't get in. S, I figure you're probably dead, but if you aren't, you were a hell of a friend and you taught me a lot. But you were still one crazy messed up redhead and I hope you have a better life now and that you were able to stop beating people up and ... I don't even know what I wish for you. Good things. You hurt a lot of people, but you never hurt me, and you helped a kid who had it easy at home but so very hard at school survive. That's awesome.
So when I write about Jeffrey in my books, the little boy whore who never had a fucking chance, who fights people he believes are weaker than him to look tough, who's braver than most but never brave enough because the odds are always, always against him, who believes in his heart that there's no such thing as a safe place but does his damnedest to make one, who hides behind the strong when he can, runs when he must, hides in plain sight, acts like a jerk in public but who's a sweet kid when he's alone with someone, I'm thinking of us. Not just S. Not just the two of us but that tiny mob. I wasn't in long. I decided it was too hard, and I went it alone, which was also hard. I doubted she missed me. I was dead weight, a liability. Not her words. She never put me down. I knew I was too weak to hang out with her. I missed her, even though she scared me.
So when Jeffrey has sex, that wonderful sweetness is exposed from under the scars of self-abuse and the abuse he's suffered all of his young life. The way he fucks is profane and full of human grace. He knows just what to do, and how to get his pleasure when he decides it might be possible to feel good just this once. He's willing to believe against all odds that this time he won't get hurt, because he does that from time to time. It helps reinforce his view of the human race when he's inevitably disappointed. And when he doesn't get hurt, it blows his mind.
He has a lot going on in that head of his. He'll get bored quick, when he's treated too well. He'll keep bracing for betrayal, and when it doesn't happen he'll start to doubt that the people he's with are smart enough to keep him safe. Maybe he'll change. He's just getting started. He has a chance to get away from his past, but he doesn't know how to survive in a world with good people without giving in to his urge to exploit them because that resource will probably be gone tomorrow. Tomorrow is a fantasy. He needs cash, clothes, food, clean water and shelter from the storm today. Today is all that ever counts, and whether it's a good day or a bad day is random to him.
This is going to have to be a series, because there's a lot. Jeffrey, by the way, makes a brief appearance in The Lord Jester's Legacy, but he becomes an important character in the next trilogy, The Poisoned Past.
I don't do writing as therapy. And I've been assuming, lately, that the sex and violence comes pretty much from my imagination and reading and my very wonderful married life and things like that. But every so often I think about the early, really miserable years when I first began figuring out things like who I want to be with and how, desire, my clumsy attempts to be desireable and all that, I realize it's not all imagination. Mark shaves his legs and arms to look younger. I shaved my arms once because I wanted my arms to look smooth, like this one girl on the volleyball team. What a disaster that turned out to be. She was the first one to make fun of me, and the mockery went on for weeks afterward. When I write about Mark shaving his arms and legs and armpits, that's back there in my mind. I know what people say about Mark, and what he knows they say about him, but he keeps shaving anyway because doing that helped him feel desirable. And he had to feel desirable. I heard the things those people say aloud in my own life. I don't have to imagine them. They had no problem putting me down right to my face. So I know how it sounds. I stopped shaving my arms. Mark didn't, because it made him feel beautiful.
It's not therapy. I'm not processing, I'm describing. The difference is, I don't have it all come out in the end the way I would have wanted the bad things in my life to turn out for the best in the end. And I don't feel a need to punish the people who hurt me on the page. Sometimes the bad guys win, and win a lot. But my good guys keep fighting and loving, because that's what good guys do.
Sometimes it bothers me to write about how cruel people are to each other, and selfish, and it really bothers me to write about characters I care about making mistakes that hurt themselves and others. But it makes the world real for me. If everything was perfect and no one hurt each other, it wouldn't be real enough to bother with. It wouldn't even be a fairytale. It would be a piece of glass resting on a white surface. Only a hint of reflection, and nothing going on. It's the same thing with sex on the page. Even the characters with low libido have a sexual life, a life where everyone's lust and infidelities and preening looks completely insane, and that makes it hard to figure out how to fit in socially when a person doesn't have those impulses, desires and need to be sexually appealing all the time.
We read to learn, and laugh, and be entertained. We piss ourselves off by reading about politics, disgust ourselves by reading about perverts, make ourselves proud by reading the sports pages (or we weep or think about giving up on those idiot losers, and then we forgive them and feel ashamed for doubting when they win) and all that stuff. Why? To answer that isn't as fun as watching ourselves watch ourselves. We're fascinating, horrible, beautiful, honorable, evil creatures overflowing with virtues and heroism and pitted with rot. Humanity. Until we solve all our problems, we'll have all these problems and we'll want to read about them because it's amazing, how awesome and inspiring human beings are, and frustrating at how brutal and selfish we can be. All of us. And we love it. In a way, it's all about love and wanting to make the world right. At least the characters I write about want to make the world right, not just for themselves, but everyone. And they all hunger for love, and for sex that's an expression of love, even when it's a brief encounter with someone they'll never see again.
That's the Lord Jester's Legacy. That will be The Kilhellion, if I can ever pull off writing about all those amazing characters, who I know so intimately, in a way that does them justice. It's a struggle right now. But it's worth it.
The first time I was propositioned, a proxy for the young man approached me, insulted me, then complemented my legs and offered money on behalf of his friend. To this day I wonder if his friend, who I knew, was being set up for a joke, if they were mocking me, setting me up, or what. I was thirteen years old, not well-liked, and feared, unbeknownst to me, by someone even more miserable at that fucking school than I was. I didn't know I had a reputation for being a tough kid until a few years later. Some of that reputation came from another friend, whose house I slept over at one night that same year. She had tons of locks on her door on the inside that she'd stolen and installed herself. When her father came home that night, drunk, she pulled me into her room, shut the door, locked all the locks and told me that we were safe, he couldn't get in. S, I figure you're probably dead, but if you aren't, you were a hell of a friend and you taught me a lot. But you were still one crazy messed up redhead and I hope you have a better life now and that you were able to stop beating people up and ... I don't even know what I wish for you. Good things. You hurt a lot of people, but you never hurt me, and you helped a kid who had it easy at home but so very hard at school survive. That's awesome.
So when I write about Jeffrey in my books, the little boy whore who never had a fucking chance, who fights people he believes are weaker than him to look tough, who's braver than most but never brave enough because the odds are always, always against him, who believes in his heart that there's no such thing as a safe place but does his damnedest to make one, who hides behind the strong when he can, runs when he must, hides in plain sight, acts like a jerk in public but who's a sweet kid when he's alone with someone, I'm thinking of us. Not just S. Not just the two of us but that tiny mob. I wasn't in long. I decided it was too hard, and I went it alone, which was also hard. I doubted she missed me. I was dead weight, a liability. Not her words. She never put me down. I knew I was too weak to hang out with her. I missed her, even though she scared me.
So when Jeffrey has sex, that wonderful sweetness is exposed from under the scars of self-abuse and the abuse he's suffered all of his young life. The way he fucks is profane and full of human grace. He knows just what to do, and how to get his pleasure when he decides it might be possible to feel good just this once. He's willing to believe against all odds that this time he won't get hurt, because he does that from time to time. It helps reinforce his view of the human race when he's inevitably disappointed. And when he doesn't get hurt, it blows his mind.
He has a lot going on in that head of his. He'll get bored quick, when he's treated too well. He'll keep bracing for betrayal, and when it doesn't happen he'll start to doubt that the people he's with are smart enough to keep him safe. Maybe he'll change. He's just getting started. He has a chance to get away from his past, but he doesn't know how to survive in a world with good people without giving in to his urge to exploit them because that resource will probably be gone tomorrow. Tomorrow is a fantasy. He needs cash, clothes, food, clean water and shelter from the storm today. Today is all that ever counts, and whether it's a good day or a bad day is random to him.
This is going to have to be a series, because there's a lot. Jeffrey, by the way, makes a brief appearance in The Lord Jester's Legacy, but he becomes an important character in the next trilogy, The Poisoned Past.
I don't do writing as therapy. And I've been assuming, lately, that the sex and violence comes pretty much from my imagination and reading and my very wonderful married life and things like that. But every so often I think about the early, really miserable years when I first began figuring out things like who I want to be with and how, desire, my clumsy attempts to be desireable and all that, I realize it's not all imagination. Mark shaves his legs and arms to look younger. I shaved my arms once because I wanted my arms to look smooth, like this one girl on the volleyball team. What a disaster that turned out to be. She was the first one to make fun of me, and the mockery went on for weeks afterward. When I write about Mark shaving his arms and legs and armpits, that's back there in my mind. I know what people say about Mark, and what he knows they say about him, but he keeps shaving anyway because doing that helped him feel desirable. And he had to feel desirable. I heard the things those people say aloud in my own life. I don't have to imagine them. They had no problem putting me down right to my face. So I know how it sounds. I stopped shaving my arms. Mark didn't, because it made him feel beautiful.
It's not therapy. I'm not processing, I'm describing. The difference is, I don't have it all come out in the end the way I would have wanted the bad things in my life to turn out for the best in the end. And I don't feel a need to punish the people who hurt me on the page. Sometimes the bad guys win, and win a lot. But my good guys keep fighting and loving, because that's what good guys do.
Sometimes it bothers me to write about how cruel people are to each other, and selfish, and it really bothers me to write about characters I care about making mistakes that hurt themselves and others. But it makes the world real for me. If everything was perfect and no one hurt each other, it wouldn't be real enough to bother with. It wouldn't even be a fairytale. It would be a piece of glass resting on a white surface. Only a hint of reflection, and nothing going on. It's the same thing with sex on the page. Even the characters with low libido have a sexual life, a life where everyone's lust and infidelities and preening looks completely insane, and that makes it hard to figure out how to fit in socially when a person doesn't have those impulses, desires and need to be sexually appealing all the time.
We read to learn, and laugh, and be entertained. We piss ourselves off by reading about politics, disgust ourselves by reading about perverts, make ourselves proud by reading the sports pages (or we weep or think about giving up on those idiot losers, and then we forgive them and feel ashamed for doubting when they win) and all that stuff. Why? To answer that isn't as fun as watching ourselves watch ourselves. We're fascinating, horrible, beautiful, honorable, evil creatures overflowing with virtues and heroism and pitted with rot. Humanity. Until we solve all our problems, we'll have all these problems and we'll want to read about them because it's amazing, how awesome and inspiring human beings are, and frustrating at how brutal and selfish we can be. All of us. And we love it. In a way, it's all about love and wanting to make the world right. At least the characters I write about want to make the world right, not just for themselves, but everyone. And they all hunger for love, and for sex that's an expression of love, even when it's a brief encounter with someone they'll never see again.
That's the Lord Jester's Legacy. That will be The Kilhellion, if I can ever pull off writing about all those amazing characters, who I know so intimately, in a way that does them justice. It's a struggle right now. But it's worth it.
January 23, 2015
emprazeman @ 2015-01-23T10:17:00
I spent a couple of days at the coast, working on the first book to the trilogy that follows The Lord Jester's Legacy. I'm not sure if I mentioned that the new trilogy will be named The Poisoned Past. I've been considering it a working title, but it's sticking, soooo ....
I spent some time walking, beach combing, and brain-storming with two other writers. I hope I'll get a chance to do this again soon. I'm pretty productive at home, too, but there are a lot more distractions. Besides, working in the same environment every day creates a sameness in creative work. I'm not against ruts in general, either kind, but it's immeasurably better to experience new stuff, change up the scenery, live under different lights and breathe different air. Or, maybe it can be measured.
I just noticed that I started both paragraphs above with "I spent." Everything we do costs us time. Video games. Cooking. Working. The work part is easy if you earn a wage. Your time is quantified and compensated. At home, that's our time, but is it spent better than it is at work?
At retirement, in theory all our time is 'our own' but it gets spent too, whether we use it or not. Some people are ahead of the curve and do financial planning for their retirement, but what about time planning? Some say they want to travel. I love travel. I say go for it. But what else?
My friend R who is retired is busier than ever, but a lot of retired people I know say they have 'plenty of time' or 'all the time in the world' and come in to shop at the same store two or three times a day almost every day of the week. So, retirement is shopping? Browsing? Talking to sales clerks?
It doesn't really matter, as long as that's the plan, that it's conscious, that it's not just a form of biding time. Because they're biding their time until death. We all are. Not to be morbid but life is morbid, with a 100% mortality rate. Whether it's getting projects done, having fun, learning stuff or all three at once, I hope that everyone who has the privilege of having a retired life seizes it with all their might and really lives. I hope they provide a good example for me, as I approach my own retirement. When I was a child I wanted to live a very long life. As a young adult I wanted to earn enough so that I wasn't struggling from day to day. In early middle age I wanted to create and accomplish things. Now I seem to spend most of my yearning time wanting to learn new skills. In retirement I don't expect to stop learning. I hope to keep learning. But I'd like to be able to focus my time on using the skills I've learned so I can master these skills and really own them so work becomes play which accomplishes work.
That probably makes no sense to anyone but me.
Anyway, here's an image from the coast at Depot Bay, Oregon of a sunbow and water spout. I hope you have a productive day, that you learn lots of stuff, and that tomorrow will be even better.
I spent some time walking, beach combing, and brain-storming with two other writers. I hope I'll get a chance to do this again soon. I'm pretty productive at home, too, but there are a lot more distractions. Besides, working in the same environment every day creates a sameness in creative work. I'm not against ruts in general, either kind, but it's immeasurably better to experience new stuff, change up the scenery, live under different lights and breathe different air. Or, maybe it can be measured.
I just noticed that I started both paragraphs above with "I spent." Everything we do costs us time. Video games. Cooking. Working. The work part is easy if you earn a wage. Your time is quantified and compensated. At home, that's our time, but is it spent better than it is at work?
At retirement, in theory all our time is 'our own' but it gets spent too, whether we use it or not. Some people are ahead of the curve and do financial planning for their retirement, but what about time planning? Some say they want to travel. I love travel. I say go for it. But what else?
My friend R who is retired is busier than ever, but a lot of retired people I know say they have 'plenty of time' or 'all the time in the world' and come in to shop at the same store two or three times a day almost every day of the week. So, retirement is shopping? Browsing? Talking to sales clerks?
It doesn't really matter, as long as that's the plan, that it's conscious, that it's not just a form of biding time. Because they're biding their time until death. We all are. Not to be morbid but life is morbid, with a 100% mortality rate. Whether it's getting projects done, having fun, learning stuff or all three at once, I hope that everyone who has the privilege of having a retired life seizes it with all their might and really lives. I hope they provide a good example for me, as I approach my own retirement. When I was a child I wanted to live a very long life. As a young adult I wanted to earn enough so that I wasn't struggling from day to day. In early middle age I wanted to create and accomplish things. Now I seem to spend most of my yearning time wanting to learn new skills. In retirement I don't expect to stop learning. I hope to keep learning. But I'd like to be able to focus my time on using the skills I've learned so I can master these skills and really own them so work becomes play which accomplishes work.
That probably makes no sense to anyone but me.
Anyway, here's an image from the coast at Depot Bay, Oregon of a sunbow and water spout. I hope you have a productive day, that you learn lots of stuff, and that tomorrow will be even better.
June 10, 2014
Saving the World
After I took a single, basic class from Academie Duello in Vancouver, B.C. (which I highly recommend) I started to think about the people who lived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In school, I was taught that in the past, because there was less knowledge overall available, and fewer trades and skills that could be practiced, that it was possible to become a Renaissance Man. A Renaissance Man, I was told, had expertise or at least a good understanding of every available craft and skill available of the age. I believe there was also a concept of a Renaissance Woman, though what would define such a person wasn't discussed in class.
The idea was that the Renaissance Man could discuss any subject brought up in conversation, and conversations were very important.
Conversations are important today, but people engage in them without considering what they're doing, which is unfortunate. That's a whole blog post by itself.
He could also do anything required of him in the course of an adventure, and he would, of course, have to be well-traveled, and travel back then was always an adventure.
The R.M. could ride well, shoot well, create an extemporaneous poem worthy of applause, write essays that stood up to criticism, acquit himself well in a duel, understand chemistry, physics, medicine and other sciences as far as they were understood in the day, speak many languages, perhaps even all the known languages of Western Europe and their trade partners, read several languages living and dead of cultures held to be important at the time plus a few languages of people few had ever heard of, etc. He probably wasn't expected to know 'common' trade stuff, so he might not be expected to shoe a horse, though snooty seventeenth century nobles might believe that of course he could if he wanted to he could figure it out. (Not! But you'd never convince them of that.)
Anyway, despite the concept's flaws and not-so-subtle exclusionary ideas that make it more possible to have someone say that you know how to do everything and have others believe that, the idea of the Renaissance Man inspired a great deal of study and effort in a class of people that otherwise might have been at loose ends. To at least be worthy to be in the presence of a Renaissance Man, or hopefully not look like a complete idiot when engaging in conversation with such a person, people read and studied and practiced a variety of skills and bodies of knowledge.
I'll go out on a limb and say that many, if not most people in our very own century learn about stuff that they otherwise might not be interested in so that they can function in today's society too. In order to function within society, we try video games that we hear our friends talking about, watch tv shows, keep up on the news, sports, and so on, even if we weren't initially interested in them, just so we could be a part of our group.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for me. I want everyone to be uplifted together. I want all of society to become better, smarter, happier, and for everyone to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives ... and yet the egalitarian, inclusive, non-judgmental attitudes toward which I lean undermines the advancements I long for. Why? Correct me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am), the very act of deciding that some skills are more important than others is imposing a bias that will necessarily exclude people who don't value the same skills. Can we all agree that certain core skills are essential? Probably not, and some of the skills we consider the most basic are skills that very smart, very skilled people don't have. An example is reading. There are lots of people who can't read who are very skilled and very smart. Therefore, reading, although nice, isn't required and if I force someone to learn to read who doesn't want to, I may not be saving them from ignorance. I might just be wasting their time and making them miserable.
Maybe the answer is that we don't exclude anyone based on what they don't know, but we include and encourage based on what they do know in order to develop a community, even a world, where everyone learns from everyone.
Of course, that would require an ability to communicate through a shared language, be it written or spoken word or some other means. (Languages! They're important!!)
Not that I'm looking for answers to anything. I'm just thinking about what inspired and developed these remarkable Renaissance Men, and what we can do to develop a concept of a World Person or something along those lines to inspire excellence in ourselves and each other. And yes, there are always people who want to keep things the same and who want to control education and force their culture on others, and in the process they force people into survival mode where the only way to make it to the next day is to shut up and keep your head down, and/or isolate people physically, culturally, or both, so that they can't learn and communicate freely from others. I'm not planning on fighting them. I'd just like to get people to think about what they can learn and want to learn, what's important to learn, vs. what we do learn passively.
Because our brains are constantly learning. The Renaissance Man had a list of stuff he needed and wanted to know, and he worked very hard to accumulate the learning he valued in order to function as best he could in his society. I think a lot of people don't just fail to think about how limited their time is or what they're doing, they fail to think about what they're learning. Given a choice between learning how to get to the next level on Candy Crush vs. learning a new language, I think most people would go for the game. Me too. And yet, I value the new language more. I need inspiration, a concept to strive for, to motivate me to spend at least some of my time to study that new language, otherwise, I'm going to play the game.
Does that mean we need social pressure in order to become capable and educated?
Capable. Educated. I'm sure in part my sense of our forebears being more educated and capable is skewed by the fact that the people and things that are recorded by history are the exceptional things and people. It still seems that in bygone eras, if for no other reason than social and physical survival, people had to be more capable and independent. Otherwise, they would starve. Even the nobles, if they were excluded from society because they were uneducated boors, ran the risk of losing status, money, their holdings, and ultimately lose their good family name which turned them into the commoners they didn't understand and could not live among. And they'd either die out or their families would eventually become part of the lower classes, indistinguishable from family lines who never had wealth or status.
Not necessarily a bad fate for uneducated boors .... They might even learn something useful, perhaps even great and wonderful.
During this time period, the lower classes in Western Europe and later in America became more and more able through industry and education to become more than what their forebears could ever dream of becoming. This led to our current society ... which now seems a bit lost. People want wealth. Sometimes they want power too, but mostly I think that most people want just enough power that they have agency. But how they try to get that money and power seems to be based on things that have nothing to do with what they actually have some control over: their skill base and their education. To our Renaissance forebears, these things were obvious. You had to have skills and you had to become as educated as possible to survive and thrive. Everything else was stuff that undermined your health and wealth, like gambling, drinking to excess, etc. You know, the usual.
Do we have more destructive distractions than our forebears? Yes, but quantity doesn't matter. Even if there was one destructive distraction in the world, you'd still have the ability to do that instead of something awesome with your time.
In school, when we learned about the Renaissance Man, I learned about the concept of specialization, and how in America and much of Western Europe we're living in an era of specialists. At the time, I felt a shiver. I'm still shivering, and it's growing stronger. I don't want people to be so reliant on the infrastructure that the reliance itself collapses the infrastructure. But more, I see the potential that's lost. With this infrastructure and culture that allows and even encourages insane levels of specialization to the point where people don't even have to know how to cook beyond pushing a few buttons, I fear that as a culture, we're not as able to troubleshoot and solve problems outside our specialties.
I think that we can do better than this. I'm watching other cultures do better than this, and I want our culture to learn from them and from our forebears, because:
We as a species can solve the world's most daunting problems if we decide to make ourselves capable of solving them. We just have to decide on the knowledge and skills we'll require to solve them, and make those socially, culturally valuable to as many people as possible. If billions of people decided that in order to be someone of worth you had to know these things and be able to do these other things that will save the world and then went out and learned and did them, just as the western world once decided what things a Renaissance Man ought to know and then Renaissance Men went out and learned those things ....
I think the result would be remarkable.
I don't think it's possible or right to regulate or insert stuff into public educational systems. That never works out. But we can learn from each other, broaden our horizons to go with the cliché phrase, and encourage each other to cram as much valuable stuff as we can into our skulls. What we choose to cram in must remain individual choice or the beauty of unique voices and cultural experiences are lost. But the idea of actively striving for something like the Renaissance Man ... is it possible to bring that to life in our day and age without incurring severe social consequences that are worse than the problems we solve?
That unanswerable question may be a bigger question, and a bigger problem, than the ones that come first to my mind when I think about the world's woes and how we can help save it.
The idea was that the Renaissance Man could discuss any subject brought up in conversation, and conversations were very important.
Conversations are important today, but people engage in them without considering what they're doing, which is unfortunate. That's a whole blog post by itself.
He could also do anything required of him in the course of an adventure, and he would, of course, have to be well-traveled, and travel back then was always an adventure.
The R.M. could ride well, shoot well, create an extemporaneous poem worthy of applause, write essays that stood up to criticism, acquit himself well in a duel, understand chemistry, physics, medicine and other sciences as far as they were understood in the day, speak many languages, perhaps even all the known languages of Western Europe and their trade partners, read several languages living and dead of cultures held to be important at the time plus a few languages of people few had ever heard of, etc. He probably wasn't expected to know 'common' trade stuff, so he might not be expected to shoe a horse, though snooty seventeenth century nobles might believe that of course he could if he wanted to he could figure it out. (Not! But you'd never convince them of that.)
Anyway, despite the concept's flaws and not-so-subtle exclusionary ideas that make it more possible to have someone say that you know how to do everything and have others believe that, the idea of the Renaissance Man inspired a great deal of study and effort in a class of people that otherwise might have been at loose ends. To at least be worthy to be in the presence of a Renaissance Man, or hopefully not look like a complete idiot when engaging in conversation with such a person, people read and studied and practiced a variety of skills and bodies of knowledge.
I'll go out on a limb and say that many, if not most people in our very own century learn about stuff that they otherwise might not be interested in so that they can function in today's society too. In order to function within society, we try video games that we hear our friends talking about, watch tv shows, keep up on the news, sports, and so on, even if we weren't initially interested in them, just so we could be a part of our group.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for me. I want everyone to be uplifted together. I want all of society to become better, smarter, happier, and for everyone to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives ... and yet the egalitarian, inclusive, non-judgmental attitudes toward which I lean undermines the advancements I long for. Why? Correct me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am), the very act of deciding that some skills are more important than others is imposing a bias that will necessarily exclude people who don't value the same skills. Can we all agree that certain core skills are essential? Probably not, and some of the skills we consider the most basic are skills that very smart, very skilled people don't have. An example is reading. There are lots of people who can't read who are very skilled and very smart. Therefore, reading, although nice, isn't required and if I force someone to learn to read who doesn't want to, I may not be saving them from ignorance. I might just be wasting their time and making them miserable.
Maybe the answer is that we don't exclude anyone based on what they don't know, but we include and encourage based on what they do know in order to develop a community, even a world, where everyone learns from everyone.
Of course, that would require an ability to communicate through a shared language, be it written or spoken word or some other means. (Languages! They're important!!)
Not that I'm looking for answers to anything. I'm just thinking about what inspired and developed these remarkable Renaissance Men, and what we can do to develop a concept of a World Person or something along those lines to inspire excellence in ourselves and each other. And yes, there are always people who want to keep things the same and who want to control education and force their culture on others, and in the process they force people into survival mode where the only way to make it to the next day is to shut up and keep your head down, and/or isolate people physically, culturally, or both, so that they can't learn and communicate freely from others. I'm not planning on fighting them. I'd just like to get people to think about what they can learn and want to learn, what's important to learn, vs. what we do learn passively.
Because our brains are constantly learning. The Renaissance Man had a list of stuff he needed and wanted to know, and he worked very hard to accumulate the learning he valued in order to function as best he could in his society. I think a lot of people don't just fail to think about how limited their time is or what they're doing, they fail to think about what they're learning. Given a choice between learning how to get to the next level on Candy Crush vs. learning a new language, I think most people would go for the game. Me too. And yet, I value the new language more. I need inspiration, a concept to strive for, to motivate me to spend at least some of my time to study that new language, otherwise, I'm going to play the game.
Does that mean we need social pressure in order to become capable and educated?
Capable. Educated. I'm sure in part my sense of our forebears being more educated and capable is skewed by the fact that the people and things that are recorded by history are the exceptional things and people. It still seems that in bygone eras, if for no other reason than social and physical survival, people had to be more capable and independent. Otherwise, they would starve. Even the nobles, if they were excluded from society because they were uneducated boors, ran the risk of losing status, money, their holdings, and ultimately lose their good family name which turned them into the commoners they didn't understand and could not live among. And they'd either die out or their families would eventually become part of the lower classes, indistinguishable from family lines who never had wealth or status.
Not necessarily a bad fate for uneducated boors .... They might even learn something useful, perhaps even great and wonderful.
During this time period, the lower classes in Western Europe and later in America became more and more able through industry and education to become more than what their forebears could ever dream of becoming. This led to our current society ... which now seems a bit lost. People want wealth. Sometimes they want power too, but mostly I think that most people want just enough power that they have agency. But how they try to get that money and power seems to be based on things that have nothing to do with what they actually have some control over: their skill base and their education. To our Renaissance forebears, these things were obvious. You had to have skills and you had to become as educated as possible to survive and thrive. Everything else was stuff that undermined your health and wealth, like gambling, drinking to excess, etc. You know, the usual.
Do we have more destructive distractions than our forebears? Yes, but quantity doesn't matter. Even if there was one destructive distraction in the world, you'd still have the ability to do that instead of something awesome with your time.
In school, when we learned about the Renaissance Man, I learned about the concept of specialization, and how in America and much of Western Europe we're living in an era of specialists. At the time, I felt a shiver. I'm still shivering, and it's growing stronger. I don't want people to be so reliant on the infrastructure that the reliance itself collapses the infrastructure. But more, I see the potential that's lost. With this infrastructure and culture that allows and even encourages insane levels of specialization to the point where people don't even have to know how to cook beyond pushing a few buttons, I fear that as a culture, we're not as able to troubleshoot and solve problems outside our specialties.
I think that we can do better than this. I'm watching other cultures do better than this, and I want our culture to learn from them and from our forebears, because:
We as a species can solve the world's most daunting problems if we decide to make ourselves capable of solving them. We just have to decide on the knowledge and skills we'll require to solve them, and make those socially, culturally valuable to as many people as possible. If billions of people decided that in order to be someone of worth you had to know these things and be able to do these other things that will save the world and then went out and learned and did them, just as the western world once decided what things a Renaissance Man ought to know and then Renaissance Men went out and learned those things ....
I think the result would be remarkable.
I don't think it's possible or right to regulate or insert stuff into public educational systems. That never works out. But we can learn from each other, broaden our horizons to go with the cliché phrase, and encourage each other to cram as much valuable stuff as we can into our skulls. What we choose to cram in must remain individual choice or the beauty of unique voices and cultural experiences are lost. But the idea of actively striving for something like the Renaissance Man ... is it possible to bring that to life in our day and age without incurring severe social consequences that are worse than the problems we solve?
That unanswerable question may be a bigger question, and a bigger problem, than the ones that come first to my mind when I think about the world's woes and how we can help save it.
May 28, 2014
The Point
When a writer tells me they're doing research, I confess that most of the time I assume that they're procrastinating. I suppose I make that assumption because that's what I do. Why do I procrastinate, or rather, do research when I should be writing? Lack of confidence. I don't feel qualified, don't feel grounded in the universe I've created, I don't know the character as well as I want to, and worst of all, when describing an action, I can't perform it myself and that makes me very reluctant to write about it.
The last is the worst for me. I may not actually describe the action in a blow-by-blow, motion-by-motion way, but I like to feel as if I could. I especially want to be able to understand an activity well enough that I can include some of the details should something not operate perfectly or go as planned. Hang fires are so much more interesting than exchanging fire with flawless precision with everyone's firearms working exactly as they should.
After all, plots are structured around things like try-fail cycles, and it would be a really short, dull book if the character tried and didn't fail. Likewise, it's not as much fun if the cannon/ship/car/dog/door works exactly the way you'd expect and does exactly what you'd want it to do.
So some procrastination, or rather, research, ends up being really valuable to writing in the end. A little preparation can make a world, even a universe of difference when I finally sit down to really write.
I'm lucky to have the ability to travel and to train with some world-class martial artists and firearms experts. I've also had a chance to interrogate professionals in some unusual fields of work: sailors that work on old square-rigs or clippers, blacksmiths, bakers that work with huge wood-fired ovens with ingredients available in the 18th century , etc. In the midst of my vacation, I managed to work with Maija on my understanding of blade work, especially on deception and various ways to engage. And I'm hoping this week to go play with Academie Duello in Vancouver, B.C. for about an hour. I'm very much looking forward to it.
Am I procrastinating? Probably. It's probably not strictly necessary to know this stuff. But even talking about it with the very kind and patient person managing their store front has woken up something in my brain. I dreamt about sword play last night. There's enough accumulated understanding beneath the surface now that my imagination can fill in details and make me feel like I'm really there.
I love that. As a reader I love that too, when a writer makes me feel like I'm there beside the character, battling the enemy, stretching my mind and my endurance to the limit, bringing justice to the world or fighting to survive against terrible odds. It's possible to do that without research. But it's so much richer with those telling details on the page.
And my life is richer when I'm learning these things I love to write about. Maybe that's a clue. When we read, we're learning. When we write, we're learning. When we try out new physical skills, and travel, and listen, we're learning.
When we're watching tv, and going to work, and doing the same things every day, we're learning too. But are we learning the things we want to learn, things we care about, things we need to know to improve ourselves and enjoy life to the fullest?
To make a conscious choice to learn skills and gain information we care about is a powerful thing. So maybe doing research isn't procrastination after all. Maybe research is necessary before we can write about what matters, really matters, in life.
Writers and artists don't research so that they can teach things like fencing and horseback riding. We share our dreams with the world. There is so much real beauty, real grace, real power in the world, that for dreams to compete they have to at least be as wonderful (or as painful, or as remarkable) as what humanity is actually capable of. Until we know what we can do, learn what we might achieve after a lifetime of study, and experience life, how can our dreams do anything but fall short of reality?
Dreams should inspire, and teach, and excite us. Hopefully dreams will help us live and make the world more beautiful by their presence. Dreams may even give us hope that things will be better someday, and guide us to create and drive us to grow and change for the better and make our hopes and desires into reality. They can't do that if they're built of vague discontent and imagined slights. They must be built of truth, and heart, and passion.
And that is the point, and why I study and research and write but most of all why I live. I live to dream, and I dream to live.
The last is the worst for me. I may not actually describe the action in a blow-by-blow, motion-by-motion way, but I like to feel as if I could. I especially want to be able to understand an activity well enough that I can include some of the details should something not operate perfectly or go as planned. Hang fires are so much more interesting than exchanging fire with flawless precision with everyone's firearms working exactly as they should.
After all, plots are structured around things like try-fail cycles, and it would be a really short, dull book if the character tried and didn't fail. Likewise, it's not as much fun if the cannon/ship/car/dog/door works exactly the way you'd expect and does exactly what you'd want it to do.
So some procrastination, or rather, research, ends up being really valuable to writing in the end. A little preparation can make a world, even a universe of difference when I finally sit down to really write.
I'm lucky to have the ability to travel and to train with some world-class martial artists and firearms experts. I've also had a chance to interrogate professionals in some unusual fields of work: sailors that work on old square-rigs or clippers, blacksmiths, bakers that work with huge wood-fired ovens with ingredients available in the 18th century , etc. In the midst of my vacation, I managed to work with Maija on my understanding of blade work, especially on deception and various ways to engage. And I'm hoping this week to go play with Academie Duello in Vancouver, B.C. for about an hour. I'm very much looking forward to it.
Am I procrastinating? Probably. It's probably not strictly necessary to know this stuff. But even talking about it with the very kind and patient person managing their store front has woken up something in my brain. I dreamt about sword play last night. There's enough accumulated understanding beneath the surface now that my imagination can fill in details and make me feel like I'm really there.
I love that. As a reader I love that too, when a writer makes me feel like I'm there beside the character, battling the enemy, stretching my mind and my endurance to the limit, bringing justice to the world or fighting to survive against terrible odds. It's possible to do that without research. But it's so much richer with those telling details on the page.
And my life is richer when I'm learning these things I love to write about. Maybe that's a clue. When we read, we're learning. When we write, we're learning. When we try out new physical skills, and travel, and listen, we're learning.
When we're watching tv, and going to work, and doing the same things every day, we're learning too. But are we learning the things we want to learn, things we care about, things we need to know to improve ourselves and enjoy life to the fullest?
To make a conscious choice to learn skills and gain information we care about is a powerful thing. So maybe doing research isn't procrastination after all. Maybe research is necessary before we can write about what matters, really matters, in life.
Writers and artists don't research so that they can teach things like fencing and horseback riding. We share our dreams with the world. There is so much real beauty, real grace, real power in the world, that for dreams to compete they have to at least be as wonderful (or as painful, or as remarkable) as what humanity is actually capable of. Until we know what we can do, learn what we might achieve after a lifetime of study, and experience life, how can our dreams do anything but fall short of reality?
Dreams should inspire, and teach, and excite us. Hopefully dreams will help us live and make the world more beautiful by their presence. Dreams may even give us hope that things will be better someday, and guide us to create and drive us to grow and change for the better and make our hopes and desires into reality. They can't do that if they're built of vague discontent and imagined slights. They must be built of truth, and heart, and passion.
And that is the point, and why I study and research and write but most of all why I live. I live to dream, and I dream to live.
